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Ice Skating and Stinky Foods: Notes from the Hong Kong Underground, 2018–2019

Fractured Scenes

Underground Music-Making in Hong Kong and East Asia
30 March 2021
by Ken Ueno

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in Publication

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Abstract: This chapter paints a personal and affective panorama of the Hong Kong underground. In the context of Hong Kong, music making is described as the making of radically contextual musical instruments and as an escape from anonymizing global forces. It paves the way for subsequent historical accounts of underground music in Hong Kong.

Gamja-jeon. A clue into how culture operates and how materials can be freed from neocolonizing histories might be learned from food culture.
On a trip to Korea, tucked away in a small side street in the Seochon neighborhood of Seoul, I discovered a restaurant where a mousy lady, the
genius proprietor, makes a transcendent haemul pajeon (seafood pancake). Scallions and octopus legs are mostly whole but bound together by a batter whose force of union is more delicate and less smothering than that which holds blueberries captive in pancakes in breakfast diners across America. In the perfect haemul pajeon, the quality of the batter is more like a canvas that presents the quality of its constituent ingredients. Somehow, though, those independent components are enlivened for being in the pajeon together. What lessons can we apply from this into music?


The greatest revelation for me in that meal, however, was the gamja-jeon, the potato pancake. Consisting of just finely grated potatoes, lightly fried, light and fluffy (like the best gnocchi) with a slight crunch, it asks to be consumed as soon as it reaches the table, when the temperature is still optimal (before it gets heavier and soggy). Like a minor pilgrimage, I understood the moment to be a temporally specific experience. I also thought of how the potato had traveled so far, geographically and in time, to this moment, while I was delighting in it. Potatoes are indigenous to the Americas and it was not introduced to Korea until the early nineteenth century. But, in the hands of the artisan chef of this small restaurant in Seochan, as I was eating the gamja-jeon, what I felt was local specificity. Is there a special quality to potatoes that allows it to float in space and time free of cultural signifiers? Certainly not. Steak frites are Belgian. Latkes are bound to a place and peoples too. And mashed potatoes are Robuchon’s. Or, more commonly for Americans, mashed potatoes carry the memory of being the mushy accompaniment to family dramas during Thanksgiving. Perhaps differences in recipes help liberate the potato from these vernacular significations. Is the distance of time a factor too? Or, that hungry, talented, peoples around the world fashioned the potato into their image, merely acting out a natural desire? The classical music score is a recipe book which, over time, lulls us into thinking that the best possible way to cook has already been achieved by a chef whose tongue was foreign to hot spices and whose mind and imagination were blind to the possibilities afforded by winged beans, exocarpium citri rubrums, and ottelia acuminatas (when fruits and vegetables are most foreign to the Western experience, they only have scientific names in English).


I have spent the 2018–2019 academic year as a Visiting Professor of Sound Art at the City University of Hong Kong. During that time, I regularly passed by the ice skating rink at the upscale Festival Walk mall as I climbed from the MTR station located in the belly of the mall to the Libeskind-designed building housing the School of Creative Media at the top of the hill.

Sometimes, on breaks, I would grab coffee and watch flocks of children learn to skate—some naturally dexterous, many awkward and fragile, like baby birds learning to fly. Other times, the somehow-calligraphic-and-meditative grace of the Zamboni coating the surface of the ice would hold my gaze for a good part of an hour. There were times I would be reminded of the first sentence of A Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” (Márquez, 1967, p. 8)

But, mostly, I considered how hot it was outside and that the ice-skating rink in Festival Walk superimposes one climate’s condition onto another. It’s hard to escape the upscale capitalist frame of the mall (think Rodeo Drive) and how all the stores are the same stores you find in fancy 28 malls around the world. At what point in the development of Asia, will we make things that the rich people of Europe and America will be compelled to purchase to show off their elite status? Until that happens, many affluent Asians will be defined by their attachment to expensive Western items and remain deferential adherents to the cultural dictates of the West. And ice-skating is present in Festival Walk for the same reason expensive handbags are there: it represents neocolonial prestige value.

But more than that, the ice skating rink is a freezing of time. A prominent figure in the art scene in Hong Kong once said to me, recounting the “Golden Age of Colonialism” (the late 1970s and 1980s), in which she grew up, “oh, we never thought of Hong Kong as part of Asia. We always looked to London, Paris, and New York, as our peers.” The decoupling of local geographic (and climate) realities from metrics of identity and culture is a strange exercise.


During the spring 2019 semester, at one of the institutions where I presented composition masterclasses, there was a small flock of students attracted to the allure of what they termed “postmodernism,” which was expressed mostly as a hodgepodge of quotes from Classical and Romantic masterworks, the most popular composer being Wagner—the ice skating rink of Western Classical music culture (somehow tragically appropriate as Wagner’s operas often yearn for a suspension of time). Within this milieu was a student who espoused a different mission. He said he was sick of blonde-haired white composers who didn’t understand Chinese culture writing for Chinese instruments. His work, he said, would right this wrong and demonstrate how to correctly compose for Chinese instruments. Being that he was a local Hong Kong student, I asked him what he meant by “Chinese,” if it was colored by language, geography, and politics. He didn’t seem to understand my question. When I asked him what his plan was for the following year, he said he would matriculate at the Central Conservatory in Beijing to pursue a master’s degree in composition. While most of his colleagues are Ice Skaters, he is a Plate-Five composer.

In the Palazzo dei Consoli in the Umbrian town of Gubbio are kept the Iguvine Tablets—a series of seven ancient bronze tablets which document the sacred rites of the pre-Roman Umbri people (examples of their rites include instructions on how to sacrifice three suckling pigs in front of a city gate). Though the content is written in the Umbrian language, the first five plates are written in an Etruscan-derived alphabet. Plates five through seven are written in a Latin-based alphabet. The transitional moment is in the middle of plate five where the alphabet changes from the Etruscan-based to the Latin-based alphabet. The change in the alphabet documents the moment when the cultural prestige and power of the Romans overtook that of the Etruscans, the moment when it became more attractive for the Umbri to change their alphabet to align themselves with the culture of the Romans in lieu of the Etruscans (which also meant that the direction of reading changed from right to left to left to right). Hong Kong has been engaged in a prolonged Plate-Five moment ever since 1997. Sometimes, painfully so. Recent developments point toward a burgeoning, anti-capitalist, mode of creativity in the young people of Hong Kong.

In his introduction to Jacques Attali’s The Political Economy of Noise, Frederic Jameson says that Attali’s greatest original accomplishment in the book was to state music’s unique potential to create a possibility of a “superstructure to anticipate historical developments, to foreshadow new social formations in a prophetic and annunciatory way” (Attali 1985: p. xi). If Hong Kong’s underground music does not annunciate a new order, it nonetheless parallels the authentic indigenous contemporaneity, a sense of community, and the creative energy of the young people of Hong Kong. Michael Pollan in his television food series, Cooked, says that fermented foods define culture. “We are the ones who eat this stinky food.” I’d like to transpose that notion into music—“we are the ones that listen to this weird music.” Members of underground music scenes everywhere are marginalized minorities. Finding our communities gives us strength.

What I see in the underground Hong Kong scene is a blurring of the traditional roles of culture exchange—performers and audience members are not specialists in production or consumption, but often are both. The musical outputs stand outside the cultural economy of the bourgeoisie tastes of the ice skating rink. Vividly contemporary, largely electronic, noise-based, and free of the musical signifiers of neocolonialism—Plate Five-ness is not an aesthetic driver. In its stead is an energy that is an assemblage sourced of non-traditional materials. In Hong Kong, we see, as we also do in small measure in micro-communities of underground music around the world, an emergence of the last stage of music’s grand narrative as heralded by Jacques Attali in The Political Economy of Noise: the age of Composition. Written in 1977, “composition” here represents a musical stage of development in society, something larger than merely “composition” as a piece of music or the art of creating such a work.

I locate other traits that link the current Hong Kong underground music scene to Attalian Composition as well. If there is a common practice, then, it is in the spirit of making new instruments. Non-transportable tools against the ever-anonymizing forces of the internet and history. Hacked electronics. Arduino-based controllers. As Attali says, “a very significant fact: the production and invention of instruments, nearly interrupted for three centuries, is noticeably increasing” (Attali 1985: p. 140). New instruments liberate participants from the semantics and forms (and modes of production and exchange) of historical instruments, which can be neocolonizing agents. It democratizes access to participation. Custom instruments begin to shift the locus of identity to the node of the individual, wherein we can all be patient zeros. Whoever we are. Wherever we are from. We can enter into a new history as equals. We eat our stinky foods and listen to and perform noise. Our radical locus of indigenous contemporaneity.

In October 2019, after having returned to my normal duties and life as a professor of music composition at UC Berkeley, I returned to Hong Kong for a two-week residency at the Osage Gallery. Drawn by an impetus to create sound art to highlight the poetic potential of the localized, I planned a mini-series of three nights of events, entitled “Vessel/Resonance/ Bread” featuring different aspects of my activities as a composer, academic, and curator/performer.

Background to My Work and Residency

Breath is at the ontological center of my art practice as a vocalist, and taking a cue from Robert Hass’ thesis that “poetry is: a physical structure of the actual breath of a given emotion,” (Hass, 2012, p. 348) my practice transposes this notion into music through physical valence. I believe that physical gestures are, indeed, mapped to given emotions. When we hear the operatic tenor, Pavarotti, sing a high C and linger there for tens of seconds, he not only suspends his breath, but, we, too, as listeners, suspend our breath. Physio-valence directs our bodies to vivify, in real time, the suspension of our breath in parallel with the music to which we are listening.

In my music, through circular breathing, that Pavarottian lingering moment is expanded to minutes, not seconds. The phenomenological reading of that lingering exacerbates traditional modes of analysis in terms of structural hearing. For example, in my piece Tard, I hold my breath in a bowl of water for 2 minutes as an analog to how I have felt my breath has been suspended since November 2016, as well as how I feel my voice as a person of color has been muted.

I employ the megaphone as a prosthetic extension of my voice. I started using it, when I started performing in large spaces with complex architectural features, which afforded the possibility of a counterpoint of resonances. Armed with a megaphone, I am mobile and can incorporate the narrative of movement in a space, direct my sound in different directions, at different structural materials and angles, and to play with various lengths of echoes. And articulating the resonant frequencies of different locations in a space means that architecture, too, can be read as harmonic structure. I have developed an array of vocal techniques specific to the megaphone. For example, a kind of slap tongue whose attack is followed by a multiphonic drone shaped by changing the vowel shapes within my mouth. The shapes of these vowels, however, do not exist in any language (they are bespoke vowels). I have also learned to control the aperture of the multiphonic (or bandwidth) with the shape of my mouth, and I can also sing in counterpoint or in augmentation with the shaped feedback multiphonic by humming into my nasal cavity. There are other techniques which involve ingressive singing, which, in alternation with exhaled techniques, allows me to circular-breathe.

Toward the end of my year in Hong Kong, Agnes Lin, the founder/ director of the Osage Gallery, attended a rehearsal of a workshop I was leading with the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble. After the workshop, Agnes graciously invited me to visit the Osage the next morning and mentioned that I should bring my megaphone. The next day, when I visited the Osage, she encouraged me to test out the acoustics of her gallery with my voice. I spent some time outside on the larger terrace, directing my voice toward the spaces between the buildings that surround the open space, bouncing my voice off the sides of the taller buildings and the different levels of the parking garage below. Then, I walked through the long gallery inside. Singing short feedback pulsations, I tested how long the sounds of my voice took to traverse the length of the space. Once reaching the other side, the sound waves were trying to double back, like a swimmer doing laps, but having exhausted its energy, dissipated. As I walked toward the middle of the long gallery, continuing to sing multiphonics, I felt the resonance swell. I discovered a sweet spot near the middle of the long gallery where it is bisected by two alleys. Aiming my megaphone upwards, I felt the feedback push back into my mouth. By changing the shape of my palate, I could shape the multiphonics bouncing through the space, into my mouth, and back out. The Osage is a complex and site-specific instrument. I could divine specific resonances in specific spots in the space. Inspired by this acoustic test, I created Vessel, for the first night of my residency (Image 2.2).



Vessel: The First Night (October 9, 2019)

Vessel is a site-specific, 40-minute installation performance piece designed for Osage Gallery’s specific acoustic characteristics. In preparing for the piece, with the help of assistants, I fabricated eight feedback circuit bowls. The bowls are plastic bowls equipped with a microphone and a transducer (a speaker that vibrates surfaces rather than air). The signal from the microphone is fed to the transducer and amplified through the plastic bowls which are used as resonators. In my recent pieces, I have used my voice in coordination with delicate interactions with the feedback bowls (it is very sensitive to the distance and angle between the microphone and transducer and affected by slight degrees of hand pressure on the resonator) to create different tones. I installed the eight feedback bowls on both sides of the long gallery, so that the directed movement of my voice (directionally projected with my megaphone in performance) could activate the feedback bowls and, thus, effectively transform the space into a droning instrument of complex microtonal harmonies. My physical movement traversing from one side of the long gallery and back during performance further helped activate the feedback bowls (proximity helps my interaction with each bowl, as I approached closer to them), as well as choreographically shaped the structure of the piece. The feedback bowls were hung with blue lights that shone through the bowls to enhance a visual sensation of “installation”-ness.

Resonance: The Second Night (October 10, 2019)

On the second night of the residency, my art practice was the subject of a panel discussion lead by Prof. Giorgio Biancorosso (HKU, Music) and Thomas Tsang (HKU, Architecture) along with the media theorist, Damien Charrieras (City U, SCM) and musician, Deborah Waugh (HKU, Music). Beginning with a consideration of recent scholarship on my work by Martin Jay and Marita Tatari on the somaesthetical aspects of my work and how my work readdresses the eminence of space and time, the panelists discussed how I approach “instrumentalizing” architecture, with a special consideration of the new piece premiered at Osage on the previous night (Vessel). Further discussion of my participation in the local experimental music scene served as an introduction of sorts to the third night, Bread.


Kung Chi Shing performing Bread. (Photo credit: Courtesy of OsageArt Foundation)

Bread: The Third Night (October 11, 2019)

The final event of my residency, Bread, was an evening length performance with local experimental musicians—Kung Chi Shing, Steve Hui, Fiona Lee, and Shane Aspegren. Having taken down the installation of Vessel, I made a score stationing my collaborators at far ends of the long gallery, as well as on the terrace outside. We played following timings indicated in the score. Armed with my megaphone, I led the audience from one performance station to another, like a Pied Piper. My collaborators each performed on homemade instruments (save for Kung Chi Shing who played an amplified violin). The site-specific nature of the performance also extended to the non-transportable performance practice of each of the performers: this was a performance one could only experience in Hong Kong, with these performers, at this moment, with this audience. This was our stinky food, our communal bread of noise. As I led the audience to the terrace outside, where Shane and Fiona were stationed, the humidity hit us as we ventured beyond the threshold of the air conditioning of the long gallery. It was as if we were stepping into not only the climate reality of Hong Kong, but its radical, Attalian future, realized.
The full group performing Bread. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Osage Art Foundation)

There is always a danger of essentialization in discussing the art and art practice conditions of non-Western loci, since we are conditioned by Western lenses with which we have been trained (I am guilty of this too). The key to going beyond anthropological distancing is to consider each artist as individuals, rather than as part of an anonymizing field. One of my favorite authors, Italo Calvino, in, Invisible Cities, says, “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.” This book honors those in the Hong Kong underground music scene who are not inferno, who contribute to the community not only through their unique and beautiful music making, but also through their advocacy of others in the scene as producers and curators and teachers.

Image 2.4 The full group performing Bread. (Photo credit: Courtesy of Osage Art Foundation) 36

References

Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Calvino, I. (1978). Invisible Cities. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Hass, R. (2012). What Light Can Do. New York: Harper Collins.

Márquez, G. G. (2000). One Hundred Years of Solitude. London: Penguin Books.







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© 2020 KEN UENO

Mark